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Welcome!

This website provides information for the paper Estimating Neighborhood Asking Rents using Scraped Craigslist Rental Listings. The goal of this research is to a.) understand the temporal dynamics of rent estimates in Seattle and b.) forecast the current quarter’s rent levels based off of the prior periods. Throughout the following analyses, the training data are 2017 Q2 up to the prior quarter (i.e. 2018 Q1). The test period is a forecast for the current period and includes comparison to the appropriate median rent estimates for data observed so far in this period.

Most graphics include some level of interactivity, usually either hover-over tooltip information or a slider to control various views of the graphic. You can download the source code and data for this project from Github here

Contact Chris Hess at hesscl@uw.edu for more information about this report.

This page was last updated: 2018-05-22



Table of Contents

  • Distribution: density graphic to investigate the distribution of rents among Seattle neighborhoods for each quarter
  • Panel Time-Series: line graphic to show the observed or modeled temporal structure
  • Spatial Time-Series: series of maps to show observed change across time
  • Model fit: tables of model root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), and deviance information criterion (DIC) across training and test data

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Observed vs. Smoothed Rent Estimates

Distribution

Panel Time-Series

Spatial Time-Series

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Observed

Spatial RE

Spatiotemporal AR(1) RE

Model Fit

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Model legend

  • int - Quarter fixed intercept
  • ns - Non-spatial tract random effect for each tract, quarter fixed intercept
  • nsar1 - Non-spatial tract random effect model, AR(1) random effect for quarter, i.i.d. random effect for quarter
  • bym - Spatial intrinsic conditional autoregressive (ICAR) tract random-effect with quarter fixed intercept
  • spt - Spatial intrinsic conditional autoregressive (ICAR) tract random-effect, AR(1) random effect for quarter, i.i.d. random effect for quarter and tract-quarter

RMSE

train_test int_rmse ns_rmse nsar1_rmse bym_rmse spt_rmse
Test 307.0736 214.1802 206.5359 206.2087 198.43619
Training 324.3490 136.1696 136.9117 138.2680 77.97499

MAE

train_test int_mae ns_mae nsar1_mae bym_mae spt_mae
Test 248.1144 160.51160 149.92773 155.44384 144.6953
Training 258.1041 89.43893 90.29539 92.75487 52.3312

DIC

int_DIC ns_DIC nsar1_DIC bym_DIC spt_DIC
-168.1242 -679.9016 -679.7958 -685.7156 -818.1495

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Non-Spatial AR(1)

Spatial RE

Spatiotemporal AR(1)